


my love/saving

by mornen



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Blood, Death, Drama, Drunkenness, Family, Gen, Gore, Organs, Pain, Parental Death, Philosophy, Unreliable Narrator, Wine, like seriously completely black out drunk unreliable narrator, playing with different versions of the stories, talk of insanity, the book of lost tales, the scarlet heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:34:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28270224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: Turgon and Maeglin speak after the death of Fingolfin.***The mountains are tall, but still the eagles can fly over them – fly to him, bring him his father’s dead body and lay it on the mountainside. At least this. A burial.He just wants to forget. Or to be something that he isn’t. Or to be somewhere else. Stab a knife in a map and make that your pick. (He will not leave.)‘You aren’t then entirely deserted,’ Maeglin says. It’s the first thing he’s said in awhile. ‘It was Manwë who would send the eagle to bring you your father’s body? He has some mercy.’
Relationships: Maeglin | Lómion & Turgon of Gondolin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	my love/saving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gaolcrowofmandos (imperialhuxness)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperialhuxness/gifts).



‘We were children,’ Turgon says. Maeglin does not answer. He sits on Turgon’s bed with his hands folded on his knee. ‘We knew nothing. How could we be anything but children? You don’t… you don’t grow wiser when there is no pain.’ 

Still Maeglin says nothing. His hair is cut at his shoulders. He has one herringbone braid running down his back. 

‘But you must know that more than anyone,’ Turgon whispers. He watches the way the light cuts a white strip over Maeglin’s face. ‘Now I know what it is to lose a parent.’

Maeglin stares back at him. His eyes are unreadable. He keeps his mouth in a narrow line. 

Turgon takes another gulp of his wine. He stares out the window. There is still blood beneath his fingernails. 

‘Fuck,’ he whispers. The mountains are tall, but still the eagles can fly over them – fly to him, bring him his father’s dead body and lay it on the mountainside. At least this. A burial. 

His fingers shake as he drinks the wine down. He doesn’t taste it. He just wants to forget. Or to be something that he isn’t. Or to be somewhere else. Stab a knife in a map and make that your pick. (He will not leave.) 

He stares at Maeglin. Maeglin silently refills his cup. Turgon thanks him with a nod. He swallows down more. The wine is dark in his golden cup. The gold is sharp, sharp in the light. It is the morning, nearing noon. He trembles. He drinks more. The gold of the cup highlights the blood beneath his nails. 

‘You aren’t then entirely deserted,’ Maeglin says. It’s the first thing he’s said in awhile. The words are flat. 

‘What?’ 

‘It was Manwë who would send the eagle to bring you your father’s body?’ Maeglin is still unreadable. ‘He has some mercy.’ His lips are set straight and tight when he finishes the sentence. His hair brushes against his cheek, against the white line cutting over it. Maeglin brushes his hair back.

Maeglin is dressed in grey velvet. He looks like his mother. He looks half dead. There is something missing in his eyes. A will to live? Turgon sits beside him. The light cuts over the stone floor of his bedroom. He has no rugs. The stone is cold in the winter. It might be a punishment. 

‘But you stay here,’ Maeglin says. ‘In hiding. Is the pain not worth it then? The wisdom or whatever it is you might gain? Growing up? 

Turgon shakes his head. His thoughts are a storm in his head – a collision of warm winds and cold winds and electricity singing. Each thought is drowned the moment after he thinks of it. He falters for an answer. 

‘We were children,’ he says again.

‘You didn’t know better?’ Maeglin asks, answers, questions.

‘We didn’t know better. How could we?’ 

Maeglin leans forward. His face is not in the light now, just his hands. They gleam white. 

‘So you would go back and change it, then?’ 

‘What?’ Turgon is watching the patterns of the light on the floor. The sun is too bright. It is warm and rich and summer. The sun shines. The ground is green. Everything is blooming or ripening. It should be raining with the sky grey and everything crying with him. He isn’t crying. There is blood beneath his nails. 

Blood on his hands. Blood on his hands. Blood on his hands. 

Turgon stumbles to the bathroom and washes his hands. He scrubs at them and scrapes beneath his nails. The rest of the blood washes off, except for one spot beneath a fingernail. He turns his nail up, ripping it up out of his skin, ripping half of it off. Now there is blood on his hands, but at least it is his. 

He lay beside his father’s dead body for a day and a half. He held him in his arms, although he was torn. He kissed his face, although it was broken. He let the night fall around them. He let the morning come. He could not cry. He has not cried. He touched his father’s chest. He touched his ribs. 

His heart was the only thing left whole in him. 

And Turgon lifted it from his body, and blood ran down his fingers, but his hair, his skin, his clothes, everything, was already touched with blood, red with blood, dried with blood, so it did not matter. 

His hair was tangled up with the blood and matted. He cut it all off, so it did not matter in the end. 

His head feels so light now. He has no crown, no braids, no adornment. His hair is gone. He runs his hand over the roughness of the cut. The sharp ends burn the nail bed on his finger.

‘What have you done?’ Maeglin asks, soft, no tone, just soft. 

Turgon stares at his reflection. He was washed. He could not do it himself. It made him a child again, but a child who carried a pain like a prison inside him. 

They had had no idea how much could go wrong. How much tragedy would hurt. How much tragedy there could be. 

He rends cloth from his sleeve and wraps it around his finger to stop the blood. Maeglin steps forward and helps him tie it into place. Turgon rends his shirt. It is a clean shirt, but he still wants it torn. He wants to show his grief openly so that everyone will know what is that he feels inside of him: The gushing pain of it. How his body is as broken as the body he held. 

He hadn’t realised how cold and still a heart could be. He should have paid more attention to pain in Valinor. He should have noticed how Fëanor was going mad with pain. 

He felt it too when he looked down at his father’s body. Something snapped inside of him. He does not know what it was, just that he will never have it back. 

He turns to Maeglin. He looks so much like Eöl. Is there a world in which Maeglin, too, is thrown to his death? Black hair spinning, eyes wild. Would his mouth still be set then? Or would it open in a scream? 

Turgon had not been able to shut his father’s mouth. Once he wouldn’t have known that. Once. Before, when they were the children of the kindest summer, golden and silver, making promises that meant nothing because there was no meaning besides joy. 

It’s nauseating. What it was like once. What it is now. He’s not thinking straight, but how can he? He is spinning, falling, and he would not be able to keep his face calm if he fell to his death. Eöl couldn’t. His eyes were terror. Maeglin watched. 

Maeglin watched the same way he watches Turgon now, no expression, eyes missing something. 

‘What is it?’ Turgon says. He finds his way out of the bathroom and falls onto the bed. He drinks down the rest of the wine in the cup. There is no blood on the cup, or in the wine. No blood on him except for the red that creeps up from beneath the white cloth around his finger. 

‘What is what?’ Maeglin says. He sits beside him. He is still awake. Idril cried herself to sleep. Turgon wonders if she dreams now. He has not slept. He will not sleep. He will not go to his brother and comfort him. It’s so far. He will not leave. 

‘What is missing from you?’ Turgon asks. ‘There’s something wrong with you.’ 

‘Love?’ Maeglin says like it’s nothing. ‘Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. I didn’t get the… whatever it is you’re supposed to get? What is it? Or maybe I only got it from my mother. And I will become like Fëanáro. Go mad for it. Lack of love. Too much love. Nothing or everything. Maybe we aren’t supposed to be like this. So dependant on someone, so desperate for something we can’t have. Maybe you see that. Maybe someday it will kill me.’

‘I’m so drunk,’ Turgon says. He gulps down water from a glass bottle and tries not to drop it. He drops it on the bed. Maeglin takes it and sets it on the table. ‘It wasn’t...’ 

Maeglin stares at him.

‘It wasn’t enough,’ Turgon says. ‘You poor child. I’m breaking because I loved him.’ 

‘You left your mother,’ Maeglin says. ‘You could have turned back, you know. At any time. Or when the ships burnt. Your wife would be alive.’ 

Turgon chokes on nothing or the air. He tries to drag his hand through his hair, but his hair is gone, and his hand hits his lap. 

‘Why must you torture me? I wanted everything. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’ 

‘Didn’t know how it would hurt?’ Maeglin says, and now his voice has a tone, but it is mocking. ‘To endure something you couldn’t imagine?’ 

Turgon nods or tries to. He stares at his hand. His hand is so clean. His hand is shaking. When will he cry? 

‘Maybe I’m angry,’ Maeglin says. ‘At you for killing my father. Or maybe that’s impossible since he killed my mother, and I hate him. Maybe I’m angry that you’re this distraught. Maybe I wanted love great enough to send me breaking down into pieces until I was nothing more than a child, not a king. If you call yourself a king, here, hidden from all. 

‘Or maybe I’m angry because I had that grief inside me when my mother died, but I couldn’t let it out, because no one there knew me, and I knew no one, and I was a stranger, surrounded by strangers, and no one could promise me that I would ever be loved again, so I had to hold myself together because no one likes a broken toy.’ 

‘Do you think you’re a toy?’ 

‘I think I’m a pawn. Or that I was. Something to keep her there. And then I was something else… maybe a bit of potential. Would I be horrid if I married your daughter? I love her, you know.’ 

‘No, no, no,’ Turgon says. ‘She doesn’t love you in such a way, child.’ He closes his eyes. His lids are heavy. Everything about him is heavy, except for his head, which is light, and could spin off him like a top. Then he would be a broken toy too. What a thing to call yourself. What a thing. His fingers reach for Maeglin, but glide through air and reach nothing. 

‘She could love you as a brother, though,’ he says. ‘Or as a cousin, as you are. She could...’ 

‘So she doesn’t?’ 

‘Yes, I guess not,’ Turgon says. ‘I guess not.’ 

‘Do you? Love me as a child?’ 

Turgon opens his eyes. Maeglin’s face is unreadable. Why must he keep himself so silent, so closed? 

‘Yes,’ Turgon says. 

Maeglin’s face does not change. 

‘Do you think that’s a bad decision?’ Maeglin asks. ‘To love someone else? Set yourself up for more pain when I die.’ 

He is immortal, but he does not say if. He says when. But then again, Turgon has been saying when lately too. 

‘We were children,’ Turgon says. ‘We didn’t know.’ 

‘No,’ Maeglin says. ‘But still, you left your mother. Don’t cry to me too hard. I never left my mother.’ His eyes are sharper then the broken ribs that cut Turgon’s hands as he reached for his father’s heart. (He had to cut them more, so not to break it.) ‘I was her guard.’ 

Turgon laughs at this. He expects the laugh to break into a sob, but it does not. Maybe it was his sanity that snapped. Maybe he’ll die now, without any promises. 

‘You didn’t guard her well then,’ Turgon says. 

‘Fuck you,’ Maeglin says, and still it is flat. There is no scoff, no sneer. Maeglin stares. ‘At least I tried.’ 

Turgon turns his face away. The wind is warm coming in through the window. The sun is so warm that it feels like a blanket around him. It is bright. It gleams sharp on the scarlet heart on the table.


End file.
